Paulette Jiles’ latest book about Texas in the post-Civil War years, News of the World, belongs in the elite group of Old West novels that includes Lonesome Dove and True Grit. A sequel of sorts to The Color of Lightning, this short novel tells the story of a retired military man-turned-news reader, Captain Jefferson Kidd. While in Wichita Falls to read the news to the isolated locals, he is offered a $50 gold piece to return a young orphan girl to her relatives near San Antonio. Johanna Leonberger was kidnapped at age six by a Kiowa raiding party, and her parents and sister killed. After four years, she is rescued by the Army; but Johanna has been transformed from a blonde-haired, blue-eyed German immigrant girl into a Kiowa who speaks no English and wants nothing to do with the white man’s world or white-haired Captain Kidd. He is reluctant to get involved but sees no other way for her to be delivered home. As a military man, he understands duty.

News of the World immerses the reader in a time and place that most of us know little about: Texas in 1870, two decades after it has been obtained from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and five years after the end of the Civil War. It is still a mostly lawless land, where a trip from Dallas to San Antonio, 400 miles southwest, is considered dangerous and borderline suicidal. Yet Kidd sets off on this “fool’s errand” with an uncommunicative, ten-year-old Indian girl in the back of his wagon. It will come as no surprise that Kidd and Johanna slowly learn to trust each other and then to communicate. Kidd is a widower with little but his news reading travels to occupy him and a hole in his heart where his wife Maria Luisa once resided. So while their developing relationship is predictable, the details provide all the pleasure.

On their journey south, the Captain and Johanna – which she pronounced “Cho-henna” encounter Army men, a child prostitute trafficker, a collection of crazy brothers who want to know why they’re not in the newspapers, and other colorful and occasionally threatening personages. The Captain gives Johanna English lessons and they discover that she remembers some German from her early childhood. At the same time, she proves to be an astute observer of human nature in both the Captain and the strangers who cross their path, as well as an independent girl with a variety of skills learned in her four years with the Kiowa. Watching their relationship develop is the novel’s chief satisfaction.

The other pleasures of News of the World are Jiles’ pitch perfect voice, with its authentic Old Texas sensibility and droll dialogue, and her prose poetry descriptions of the natural world in this mostly empty land. Early on their trip, during an impressive North Texas storm, she escapes, and the Captain finds her standing at the edge of the flood-level Red River.

“There at its edge, on a lift of red stone no more than thirty yards ahead, stood Johanna, wet as a dishcloth and her skirts heavy with rain. She clutched the doll to her chest. In the explosive lightning flashes the Captain could see, on the far side of the flood, a party of Indians. They were on the move. They had probably been flooded out of their campsite. The Red was still rising. Entire pecan trees rolled and ground like mill wheels in the current. The Indians had stopped to look across, perhaps at the distant lights of Spanish Fort, and Johanna was calling to them in Kiowa but they could not hear her. It was too far, the river was too loud.

“She put down the doll and shouted at the Indians with her hands around her mouth. What could she possibly think would happen? That they would come for her? She was shouting for her mother, for her father and her sisters and brothers, for the life on the Plains, traveling wherever the buffalo took them, she was calling for her people who followed water, lived with every contingency, were brave in the face of enemies, who could go without food or water or money or shoes or hats and did not care that they had neither mattresses nor chairs nor oil lamps. They stood and stared across the water at her like creatures of the sidhe, wet and shining in every flash from overhead.”

It will not surprise the reader when the Captain and Johanna arrive in Castroville, west of San Antonio. As he promised the Army officer at start of the story, he delivers his young charge to her aunt and uncle, who had no idea she was coming, and aren’t quite sure what to make of her. A complicated situation ensues that does not play out the way some would expect.

Underpinning this traditional story is the pragmatic but compassionate soul of Captain Jefferson Kidd. One feels honored to meet this man and get to know him. The world has brought the news to the Captain and the story of these two vastly different survivors and their second chance at experiencing a sense of family is touching and memorable. It is no surprise that News of the World was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction.

News of the World blog tour schedule

Read Her Like an Open Book is the final stop on the NOTW blog tour. If you’re interested in what other bloggers had to say about the book, here is the itinerary.

2 thoughts on “NEWS OF THE WORLD takes readers on the memorable journey of an old man and an Indian girl across a lawless Texas in 1870”

A blog tour! I guess this just came out in paperback. I read this one last year and reviewed it for my own blog in hardcover. I loved it. Loved it so much it has become one of my lifelong favorite reads. As I recall I quoted the same paragraph in my review that you did. The writing was wonderful, but the heart of the book was what got to me in the end. I have no better word than ‘heart’ to describe what I mean. It’s not that useful a word, too vague, but it will have to do.

I did not know that it was a sequal, of sorts. I’ll have to look up the previous book.

Yes, it was published last month in paperback, and the publisher put together a “blog tour” to promote it. A different blogger reviews the book each day for a few weeks, with several of them running supplemental pieces like the interview with Paulette Jiles that I posted. It’s one of those books that resonates for quite a while after you read it. I find myself wondering about Johanna and her life with John Calley. Fascinating history and storytelling.